01.05.14

The Google-rigged life

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:53 pm by George Smith

Associated Press has published a bit of inside-look news on the business of Internet rigging. None of this is new to readers. But some of it is worth underlining because it is the Google-rigged American internet, and our corporations, that are the reason for it.

The global network, developed here, is now a fertile ground for sweat-shop click factories and website riggers in the poorest parts of the world, employed by American business to inflate their net statistics and social networking numbers.

Anyone could have seen it coming:

[An] Associated Press examination has found a growing global marketplace for fake clicks, which tech companies struggle to police. Online records, industry studies and interviews show companies are capitalizing on the opportunity to make millions of dollars by duping social media …

Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city of 7 million in South Asia, is an international hub for click farms.

The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients’ social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. “Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine,” Shaiful Islam said.

A recent check on Facebook showed Dhaka was the most popular city for many, including soccer star Leo Messi, who has 51 million likes; Facebook’s own security page, which has 7.7 million likes; and Google’s Facebook page, which has 15.2 million likes.

[Oops!]

In Indonesia, a social media-obsessed country with some of the largest number of Facebook pages and Twitter users, click farms are proliferating.

Ali Hanafiah, 40, offers 1,000 Twitter followers for $10 and 1 million for $600. He owns his own server, and pays $1 per month per Internet Protocol address, which he uses to generate thousands of social media accounts.

Those accounts, he said, “enable us to create many fake followers.”

The Associated Press story features boilerplate on how bad it is. It reports Google and others do not approve and strive to stop it. The Internet rigging industry has also spawned corporate counter operations in which specialty firms are hired to analyze counts and expose click fraud, allegedly to preserve the sanctity of true popularity and the internet experience.

But please. It’s dead. And it was Google and other internet giants who did the deed.

Yes, by all means, we should listen to this advice:

David Burch, at TubeMogul, a video marketing firm based in Emeryville, Calif., said that buying clicks to promote clients is a grave error. “It’s bad business,” he said, “and if an advertiser ever found out you did that, they’d never do business with you again.”

Yes, bad. But here’s the way the world Google, Facebook and Twitter works:

They’ve made this digital ecology where only the very top results in search, the biggest numbers on social media, matter. It’s their code that did it, their design. They own it and it’s a winner-take-all place. There isn’t anything for anyone else. Not even crumbs. It’s the top or nothing. Root hog or die.

Since that’s the case they bear the responsibility for making the incentive to cheat overriding.

Taking measures to stop cheats doesn’t fix this. These are just band-aids over a system of rot that is web search and its social approval and reward by numbers ecology.

And to a great extent, it’s to Google’s and Facebook’s and Twitter’s advantage.

For instance, it is only through being in the top of search, or at the top in numbers of “likes,??? that one is rewarded by linking and algorithms which present you to others, thereby giving one the opportunity for practical monetizations.

On the other hand, it also means Google and everyone else that made the environment have to pay much much less in their “revenue sharing??? schemes while passing out blandishments that everyone can be made “partners??? in monetization.

What it is, in the end, is that their monetization schemes are now like a chance at winning the lottery for almost everyone. Nonexistent.

Last, our human nature in dealing with the web has a hand in the mess.

People respond strongly to perception of popularity and that perception is gained by counts.

When everything is judged by numbers of clicks and likes and position in the top fold of the search return, everyone else not there might as well not exist.

To take advantage of cheating schemes, then, is not illogical.

I’ve said this cynically, but truthfully, once:

You’re already in a pit Google-world made for you. So if you take advantage of search gaming or buying astro-turf and likes from click farms, what’s the worse they can do?

Make you more invisible? Haw. [Bitter laughter.]

Let’s explain it again.

If you’re not in the top you are toast, thanks to American-made search and social-networking technology.

It’s a somewhat different matter for those already at the top who stupidly buy more rigging and get caught at it. Then they have a negative publicity effect to deal with.

But for those who have no publicity, they are not likely to get any on Facebook or wherever because here’s another open secret:

Even if you promote yourself honestly on Facebook or Twitter and pay scrupulous attention to your ‘friends’ and ‘followers, now the situation is such that no one pays attention because, once again, they look at your numbers (or Facebook algorithms look at your numbers), and you get nothing, or are hidden from the all important stream because, well, you’re a nobody.

In the Culture of Lickspittle, nobody does favors for anyone below them.

Since this is the way it is one cannot totally honestly argue that there is a practical serious downside to getting into rigging other than potentially losing an account that couldn’t be monetized into anything, anyway.

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Gaming YouTube — from the archives.

Google’s revenue sharing and advertising scams.

Internet counts and popularity:

In the alternative world that began with the true rankings reversed [by count inflation], the least popular song did surprisingly well, and, in fact, held onto its artificially bestowed top ranking. The most popular song rose in the rankings, so fundamental quality did have some effect. But, overall – across all 48 songs – the final ranking from the experiment that began with the reversed popularity ordering bore absolutely no relationship to the final ranking from the experiment that began with the true ordering. This demonstrates that the belief that a song is popular has a profound effect on its popularity, even if it wasn’t truly popular to start with.

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Hat tip to Pine View Farm where I more incoherently chalk-boarded it.

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